Opinion: Save lives: Legalize, regulate and tax marijuana

Jack A. Cole, a retired New Jersey State Police detective lieutenant, is chairman of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

FOR 44 YEARS the United States has fought the war on drugs, wasting 1.5 trillion of our tax dollars on ever-harsher policies that have been complete failures. During that time, we made more than 48 million arrests for nonviolent drug violations, nearly half of which were for marijuana offenses.

And yet today, drugs are cheaper, more potent and far easier for our children to access than they were when I started buying them in 1970 at the start of my 14-year assignment as an undercover detective in the New Jersey State Police.

That is the very essence of a failed public policy.

After 26 years, I retired and co-founded Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a nonprofit educational organization that represents more than 100,000 police, judges, prosecutors, prison officials and supporters in 120 countries.
LEAP members do not condone drug use, but we know that such use is not dependent on whether the drug is considered legal or illicit.

We cannot arrest our way out of these problems. Drug use in the United States is not unusual. More than 112 million Americans, including Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, admit to having tried marijuana.

The goal then should be to create a system acknowledging those facts, while reducing the deleterious aspects of drug use as much as possible.

Prohibition has never worked. It is time for alternate solutions. The bill Sen. Nicholas P. Scutari introduced to legalize, regulate and tax adult marijuana use will correct the portions of our failed drug policy that concern marijuana laws.

Before we had a war on drugs, police were credited with solving 91 percent of all murders, but by 2010, New Jersey law enforcers were solving only 61 percent of those homicides. They currently fail to solve 39 percent of murders, 64 percent of rapes and arsons, 75 percent of robberies, and 87 percent of home burglaries.

Wasted time

It is not their fault. Police are required to expend so much time chasing around nonviolent drug offenders that they no longer have the staff or energy to protect citizens from violent criminals. Legalizing marijuana will effectively end the arrests of those individuals involved in the marijuana culture and allow the police a vast amount of additional time to work on far more important issues.

When passed throughout the United States, bills such as Scutari’s will effectively remove 60 percent of the profits from Mexican drug cartels, striking a blow against them that law enforcement has been unable to match during the course of the drug war.

The role of police should be to protect each of us from violent predators, not to protect every adult from himself or herself by saying what substances we can ingest.

Impact on children

Current policy also creates two very injurious systems impacting our children: High School students tell us it is easier to buy marijuana than it is to buy beer and cigarettes because drug dealers don’t check IDs, and, according to the DEA, 900,000 teenagers have decided to risk severe punishment in order to participate in the very lucrative business of selling marijuana.

Neither of those things will occur in a legal, regulated and controlled marijuana market. When you legalize drugs, you remove them from the hands of our youth and place them in the hands of responsible adults over whom we have some control.

Legalizing marijuana will actually reduce teenage drug use in New Jersey just as similar reforms in other states’ laws that have legalized and regulated or decriminalized marijuana have reduced teen drug use in those states. Other countries, such as Portugal, that have decriminalized all drugs for adults have also reduced drug use by juveniles. After Portugal decriminalized those drugs, use among 13- to 15-year-olds decreased by 25 percent and use among 16- to 18-year-olds decreased by 22 percent.

Studies by the Universities of Colorado, Utah and Washington, reveal that in states that have passed medical marijuana bills, the rates of fatal motor-vehicle accidents have declined by 9 percent and the rates of suicides among 20- to 29-year-old males have declined by 11 percent. A decline was not seen in surrounding states where such reforms were not passed. All that was accomplished while there was no increase in marijuana use by juveniles.